Ted Cruz and the Birther Blowback

Texas Senator Rafael Edward Cruz has been working hard over the past year to make everyone forget Joe McCarthy. As the new poster child of the “wacko-bird” caucus, Sen. Cruz has yet to find a crankish Tea Party conspiracy theory he couldn’t either get behind or ride on.

Now we discover that the man is a foreigner. Who can you trust these days?

Cruz’s Canadian citizenship has no legal implications and should not mean anything politically. If Republicans like Cruz had not been tied up in six years of rhetorical dumpster-diving over President Obama’s “past,” no one would even know that Cruz was a Canadian – not even Cruz himself.

As proof that God loves irony, we are discovering that Ted Cruz is in fact what the Birthers imagine Obama to be – an American born to a citizen parent in a foreign country. The implications of this revelation are too rich to be ignored. Let’s be absolutely clear, even if all of the terrifying far-right conspiracy theories about Barack Hussein Obama were actually true, he would be just as legally qualified to be President as Rafael Edward Cruz.

So, let the great Birther rumpus begin! Cruz “supposedly” produced a copy of his birth certificate last week, but who is really going to believe that? Sure, it has official seals, and all the details line up perfectly with every detail of his story, but aren’t some of the fonts suspicious? Why is Sen. Cruz trying to fool us with such a crude forgery?

And why is he only producing it now, after the issue has been hovering in the air for so long? Why did he wait until after he was elected Senator to share the scandalous details of his birth? How much can we trust a man who may be hiding his divided loyalties to our socialist neighbor to the north? What else is Rafael Cruz hiding behind the friendly sounding nickname “Ted?”

These sound like stupid questions because they are stupid questions. For the rest of the country outside the right wing information bubble, this whole debate is a joke. Yet far-right entertainers like Sean Hannity and Rep. Steve Stockman have managed get indignant about the accusations against Cruz without acknowledging the rank idiocy of pointing those same concerns at Obama.

The Cruz-Birther Blowback is an opportunity for the Republican Party to take a breath and recognize the dangers of its extended flight from reality. There are a lot of very good reasons to dislike Obama’s policies. None of them make 40 Congressional votes to repeal Obamacare seem any less childish.

There is still time for the GOP to sober up before the 2016 election. Watching Sen. Cruz scramble to scrub away that incriminating maple odor might inspire Republicans to focus on a policy agenda rather than loony conspiracies.